This is just an all purpose thread for fun stories about role-playing games. These can be personal or shared from across the internet.

To start, here's a few more famous stories some of you might never heard about:

Old Man Henderson: The story of one man's decision to not go gently into that good night. Basically, an unfair killer GM was making a Call of Cthulhu game miserable for his players, when one member of the group decided he'd had enough. So he created Old Man Henderson, perhaps the ultimate revenge character in the history of gaming. What starts as one player's payback quickly involves a 300 page backstory, an old man's quest for his missing lawn gnomes, dropping a boat onto the top floor of a skyscrapper and killing an Elder God.
- https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Old_Man_Henderson
- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/F ... nHenderson

The Ballad of Edgardo: A story so great it actually broke the forum it was being played on. Two friends found an RP message board with some very concrete rules on how that game was run. The setting was described as "anime-esque", with to the friends meant "defeating evil through hard work, a belief in justice and the power of friendship", only to find that everyone there took it to mean "Brooding, bishie "heroes" and villains who dedicate themselves to slaughter while frowning on anyone giving a crap". Worse, Edgardo had built his character around a fun concept rather than minmaxing, but despite that continued acting like a hero. What happens from there is an example of roleplaying, beating the bad guys at their own game, and of light overcoming darkness.
- https://1d4chan.org/wiki/The_Ballad_of_Edgardo
- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/R ... dOfEdgardo

And a slightly shorter story taken from RPG.net: The SUperlative HAMMER-WHEEL!

My "Worst Character Concept Ever", submitted to me by a prospective player in a Champions game was going to run (but never got off the ground):

The Superlative (Invincible, Indestructible, etc.) Hammer-Wheel.

The Invincible Hammer-Wheel's power is that he has hammers for hands and wheels for feet. Or it could have been wheels for hands and hammers for feet. The player himself wasn't sure, but my mental picture of the character is a man with monster-truck wheels plugged into where is arms should be, who drives up to villains and kicks them with his sledgehammer feet.

Here's basically how the conversation went:

Player: I hear you're running a superhero game. Can I play?
Me: Sure. Do you have a character concept in mind?
Player: The Invincible Hammer-Wheel!
Me: Uh... (keep in mind this was to be a "serious" supers game)
Player: He has hammers for hands and wheels for feet! Or, wheels for hands and hammers for feet. I haven't decided.
Me: And how did he come by these "powers?"
Player: He was born that way.
Me: Must have been rough on his folks...
Player: He was raised by farm implements.
Me: ...and his motivation for doing good?
Player: He lives in the woods.

So whenever people bring up their "worst concept" horror-stories, all I have to say is;

"The Invincible Hammer-Wheel.
He has wheels for hands and hammers for feet.
He was born that way.
He was raised by farm implements.
He lives in the woods."

...

Honestly, that campaign was doomed from the start. The other (marginally less awful) character concepts I recieved were:

Batman.. with Guns. Years later when I first saw the Harbinger of Justice, this guy's concept immediately came to mind.

Japanese demon dressed in full Kabuki costume with flame powers and a cursed katana. No background or heroic motivation, but a damn cool sketch (player in question was an artist). I came across the sketch a while ago, and planned to use it for a writeup of Kagutsuchi, who would have been a Susano Orbatos clone from Masamune's Shirow's Orion. However, I seem to have lost the sketch again

Guy with a glove that could launch time-delay explosive "bombs." This was the video-game geek's contribution.

Powered-armor guy, basically a man-sized Valkyrie from the Robotech cartoon. This from the Battletech nut.

The funniest part was that I'd pre-planned to have the characters meet up with trying to take on a super-powered arsonist who was holding the city hostage. I can't imagine how this assemblage of characters would've saved the Mayor from the burning City Council building.

These are fun to read,especially the Old Man Henderson one (the GM did kindof deserve that one:i'm all for being a bit of a Dick as gm,but he was taking that a little bit too far).Sometime this week,rl permitted,i'll post up part of one of my favorite Recent Campaigns that just ended.....let's just say Henderson would've loved the chaos....

We had a cocky and annoying player in our group that always rode to the rescue, stole thunder and was an all around jerk. My ranger was becoming a mascot as a result, despite actually being higher level. It was annoying. I`d try and do something, he'd one-up. And not just me. DM tried to quell it, but the guy was rules-lawyering.

Get to the scene where everything is on the line, we're trying to do the group thing. The only one with a ranged weapon left able to act is my ranger. Player makes a comment that really annoys me, so I got up to walk away for a minute. He made another disparaging comment and I was about to turn around and tell him where to go. Another player just muttered to take the high road. I realized I'd stood up with my D20 in hand, so I spun, and mimed an arrow shot before dropping the dice onto the DM`s desk. Without looking at it, I "called" my shot. Catcalls and laughter from that guy - you need a nat 20 for that to work! hoo hoo, ha ha.

DM grabs and tugs my shirt, gestures over to someone else.

I got a nat 20.

Ah. good times.

Last edited by Bladewind on Tue Jul 24, 2018 12:15 am, edited 2 times in total.

As with most such stories (including several of the ones that have been cited), it more or less relies on someone minmaxing, and the GM agreeing to go along with their insanity even when it alienates the other players, although honestly, this group had it coming.

And now, the Spoony One's story of showing a bunch of Vampire players why "beating up the new guy, duct taping him to a chair, torturing him with a blowtorch and threatening to mind-screw him into joining their faction" is not proper "welcome the new player" etiquette.

There's an old Tomb of Horrors story that I've heard that I got quite a kick out of.

For those that don't know, back in the day, D&D sponsored conventions use to have "Tournament Modules", which were basically meat grinders player groups would have to fight through, getting scored on things like time, number of surviving original party members, etc. Well, at a few conventions people bragged within ear shot of Gary Gygax, (you know, the grand daddy of D&D) that his modules were a breeze to get through.

So Gary decided he'd write the most sadistic Tournament Module he could. He called it Tomb of Horrors, and it was infamous for being a nightmare for D&D players of the day. Gary basically filled the thing with all kinds of instant death traps where you either made your save or you died instantly, so your character's hit points didn't really matter. Hell, heroes had a 2/3 chance of getting instantly killed just entering the Tomb.

Furthermore, there wasn't a whole lot in the way of mobs to fight, or gear to gain, so your characters really didn't level up over the course of the adventure. So it was a module that was 99% traps with a couple of fights, including a boss fight where you needed to supply your own magic gear to defeat him. The Tomb didn't have some vault with an Infinity +1 Sword that could help smite the last boss. Or at least, not one that Gary had thought of.

See, one of the traps is this crown/scepter combo that they find in a room with instructions that if you someone wears the crown and you touch the end of the scepter to the crown, you gain some permanent stat bonuses. However, the scepter has two identical sides, and if you touch the wrong end to the crown, the person wearing it just flat out dies. No save, you dead.

Well, one party knew about this, and took the crown with them out of that room, rather than leaving it there like most would. And when they encountered the boss, the Rogue snuck up behind the boss and put the crown on his head. And then the group's best Fighter said, "I touch the crown with the bad end of the scepter."

The GM running the module was flabbergasted. Luckily, Gary was at the convention the module was being run at, and someone went get him. When the situation was explained, Gary thought about it for a moment, smiled, then said, "Yep. Bad guy's dead."

After that, the module got re-written so that the crown and scepter couldn't be removed from the room. But they had to re-write that module a lot. Originally, to create these impassible doors the players couldn't just beat down, they were said to be made of Mithril and Adamantine. Some industrious players instead said, "Screw the Tomb" and spent days excavating the Mithril doors from the walls and leaving the dungeon with them, since they now had ten foot tall, 6" thick slabs of Mithril they could sell to the dwarven kingdoms for an insane amount of money and get filthy rich. Re-writers of the module said that the doors were magically enchanted "to mimic the properties of Mithril" and would become normal steel if they left the tomb.

This was a for a short lived 2E M&M game. We had Chang Li, the ancient Kung Fu master from the future who spoke in badly dubbed Madarin. Basically he'd speak Mandarin but his universal translator belt doohickey translated it into the kind of English you get in 1970s Hong Kong kung fu action flicks. Otherwise a pretty straight forward martial artist character.

We had Sergeant Kill - Who looked like Rob Lefield personally created him. Complete with huge muscles, huge guns, tiny feet, and no wrists. HE had the personality of Captain Marvel. His catch phrase: "Remember kids, support public transportation."

Trevor. That was it, guy had luck powers and variable power and that was it. The whole gag he had no ideal he has superpowers, he just though he was crazy lucky. Wall crawling? That was just the right shoes, humidity in the air and just enough of a run up to get the effect. Everything was explained like that, no matter how stupid we did that. He also had Jeeves, a robot butler. It didn't have states, but we'd worked out an idea where he'd eventually end up with a sidekick in the form of Mecha-Jeeves.

I ran the adventure from Freedom City 2E book, the one where Kraken captures the city and lifts it into space. I was very much playing up the whole Age of Sail pirate vibe Kraken has going when Trevor's player busts out this on line which did us in for about 15 minutes: "Don't worry, I know what to do. I've seen Pirates of the Caribbean!"

Jeff P. was an arrogant piece of work, he claimed he could build a character who could trash whole teams, which led to Doug letting him build and play Infinity as a foe to Eclipse, the team of heroes Doug GMed.

Doug set it up. Infinity was holding the mayor of Houston hostage on the third floor of City Hall. Sentinel (my PC), Mass Master (Eric's PC), Billy Bob McGraw, and Ronin show up outside, along with the police. And all the players had heard Jeff's "trash talk". Then Eric had an idea, and pulled me and Doug aside. I liked it, and Doug approved it. And this was 25 years before Captain America: Civil War was released. Sentinel and Mass Master ducked behind one of the police cars. Mass Master shrunk down to his tiniest, 6" size. And got into the concave side of Sentinel's shield, hanging onto one of the arm straps.

Sentinel got up, said something to taunt Infinity, and threw his shield up through a thrid floor window in Infinity's general direction. Infinity easily sidestepped it. (I had told Doug, explicitly, that while it was meant to look like an attack, I just needed to get the shield through the window pane, and I expected Infinity to not be hit.) Doug had Jeff roll Infinity's perception check. And, of course, being action figure sized, Mass Master is hard to spot.

And then Mass Master grew to his full 60' foot height and Haymakered (sort of the Hero System version of a Power Attack) Infinity down an elevator shaft. Doug let Infinity get a round of gunfire off at Mass Master, but between the haymaker and the hard landing, "I can beat an entire team" Infinity was one-punched. Honestly, Jeff rolled really well on the round of gunfire and Mass Master was knocked out too (but not wounded). But still, it was a victory for us, and a humbling experience for Jeff. So of course, he wanted the rematch that led to Infinity awaking and escaping during the twenty minutes between this and the next session.